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Barley occupied over 65% of the total food production in Tibet Autonomous Region. It is cultivated in the valleys and in the higher land on Tibet. Currently, the total cultivated barley area was about 117,900 ha that makes up more than 69.7% of the total area of grain in Tibet. Barley was traditionally cultivated in spring, but winter barley is nowadays relatively common. All cultivated barley varieties are hulless barley, also called naked barleys. With a long history of hulless barley use, Tibetans have established unique ways of preparing food products from it which are culturally and economically adapted to the primitive mountainous region of the Tibetan Plateau. This chapter introduces the traditional ways of preparation of hulless barley into Tsangpa (roasted barley flour) which is the main product, chang brewed from hulless barley that is the major alcoholic beverage, and barley also made into cakes, soups, porridge, and snack foods. The significance of hulless barley is also remarkable in Tibetans’ daily life. This chapter provides that reasons for the choice of barley as a staple food crop by Tibetans are the adaptation mechanism to survive in the harsh condition of mountain area.

This chapter focuses on major issues and implications of groundnut production, processing, distribution and consumption, discussion of yields and area harvested, world prices and trade illustrates strong and weak links in the world groundnut sector.

The rheological properties of extrusion-cooked wheat starch have been measured in parallel experiments using an instrumented slit die on a twin-screw extruder and a Boh I i n VOR rheometer,wi th parallel plate geometry in oscillatory mode, over the frequency range 0.2–20 Hz. Shear rates approaching those used in the production of snack foods and crispbreads have been achieved,for melt samples of wheat starch over a range of moisture contents, with the aim of correlating on-line viscometric measurements with laboratory measurements on a research rheometer.

This chapter contains discussions of specialized potato chip equipment. More general types of equipment sometimes used in the potato chip industry, such as packaging equipment, certain types of fryers, salt applicators, etc., will be covered in other chapters.

In the First Edition of this book, this chapter was entitled “Nuts.” During the eight years since that volume appeared, there has been a steadily increasing interest in the development of fruit-based snacks, and although these snacks are still less important commercially than nuts (and many other types of snack products), there are enough technologists and scientists working with them to justify a discussion of some of the most important ingredients used in them.

The use of food extrusion as a commercial technology dates back to the mid-1980s. Since that time, the range of extrusion equipment has expanded considerably along with the types of products manufactured. Today, extrusion-processed foods consist of a variety of snack foods, ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereals, textured vegetable proteins used as meat analogs or extenders, infant food formulations, beverage and soup bases, and precooked starches. Details of the development of extruded food products have been given by Harper (1981A,B). To manufacture this array of products, extruders must process a wide range of food ingredients. The most common ingredients are cereal flours or grits, used as a source of carbohydrate and the base of most products, defatted oilseed meals, which are high in protein and, to a much iessex degree, lipids, starches, and mono- and disaccharides.

The use of flavoring materials, both natural and artificial, and of added coloring to make snacks more attractive or merely to differentiate them from competitors’ products obviously is becoming more prevalent. Although many if not most of the ingredients described in previous chapters have some effect on the appearance and taste of the finished products, this chapter contains discussions of those substances that are added in relatively small amounts for the specific purpose of favorably influencing color and flavor.

The ingredients described in this chapter are either glycerides of fatty acids or are compounds added to modify the function or storage stability of such substances. Manufacturing processes will be discussed briefly, because an understanding of the elements of these techniques is important in developing meaningful specifications and quality control tests.

Although most snack products are based on cereals, there are a few that are composed primarily of animal-derived raw materials. The definition of “snacks” can be broad or narrow, and the looseness of the definition will govern the number of meat products that can be included in the present category. Almost every consumer would agree that fried bacon rinds are snacks, since they have texture, appearance, and flavor very similar to puffed or fried cereal pieces and are sold in portion-size pouches for eating mostly between meals. Jerky departs somewhat from the typical snack in form and flavor, but its sales presentation and mode of consumption fit the familiar pattern. Small individual sticks of fermented cured sausage of the Slim-Jim® type would generally be recognized as snack products because of the way they are offered for sale and consumed, even though their predecessor forms are used in sandwiches or in other ways as meal components. I have also included a discussion of pickled pigs’ feet, even though many readers will surely object that the form of packaging and the physical characteristics of the food set it apart from the usual snack. My reason for discussing it in this book is that it is representative of the pickled snacks (sausages, eggs) that are sold in taverns from glass jar multipacks and sometimes in individual pouches.

Although it could probably be shown that nearly every available kind of cereal ingredient has been used in some form of snack product, popcorn and cornmeal are the ingredients utilized in the largest quantities by the snack industry. Substantial amounts of whole corn are also made into corn chips and other tortilla-style snacks after conversion to masa, an alkalized dough that is a traditional processing intermediate. Cookies, crackers, pretzels, and other snack foods whose manufacture is based on the processing of fermented or chemically leavened doughs require large amounts of wheat flour. Rice and other cereals are used in much lower amounts, at least in the U.S. snack industry.